As I was approaching the final year of my Psychology degree, I had to choose the topic of my final project. I was increasingly interested in technology and how it impacts our behaviour and the brain as we are surrounded by technology in daily tasks.  

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According to the software company Rescue Time, at the beginning of the year 2019, people spend on average of 3 hours and 15 minutes per day using their smartphones (MacKay, 2019). These statistical numbers are increasing on average by 20 minutes every year (MacKay, 2019). This is a significant amount of time that people devote to their devices. Smartphones have become supplementing tools of human brains, one could say that they make peoples' lives easier, but how good it actually is for us?

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In the recent study of Barr, Pennycook, Stolz and Fugelsang (2015), researchers found that intuitive thinkers and individuals, who tend to think less analytically, when solving problems, tend to rely on their smartphones. The authors called it “offloading thinking to technology” which may capture the new trend in cognitive thinking of this era (Barr et al., 2015). According to Gausby (2015), peoples’ average attention span is 8 seconds, which is 4 seconds less than in the year 2000. Attention span is characterised as the duration of time when focusing, until being distracted (Berger 2018). It is apparent that people’s attention span has decreased over the last decade, however, there has not been found evidence, explaining this phenomenon.

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There has been an ongoing debate, on how this habitual involvement with smartphones impacts the human brain with mixed evidence. Many studies I have read were quite outdated as technology evolves at a rapid speed, and the research is time-consuming and expensive. I wanted to research how technology impacts attention.

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In response to the mixed evidence of how high smartphone usage impacts the ability to focus, I teamed up with Dr Tim J. Simth and a few other classmates to design a study that aimed to investigate whether there are differences between high smartphone users and low smartphone users in performance in two attentional tasks - Visual Search Task (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) and Sustained Attention to Response Task (Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley & Yiend, 1997). We were the first study that used Screen Time (a tool that is automatically built into iPhones and downloadable as an app in Androids).

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The predictions presented in this study were, that high smartphone users will be better at parallel search (participants are asked to search for a specific target, unique by its feature among other features), also found in toddlers (Portugal, Bedford, Cheung, Gliga & Smith, 2020), and the low-user group will do better in the SART task, to demonstrate, that users who use their phones less frequently will be better at sustaining their attention.

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There are two types of smartphone interruptions, that impact individuals’ ability to focus during task performance – endogenous and exogenous interruptions (Wilmer, 2017). Endogenous interruption is evoked by an individual’s mind when he/she thinks or reaches for a smartphone to receive instant gratification (Wilmer, 2016). The exogenous interruptions come from environmental cues such as app notifications, hearing conversations regarding smartphones, etc. (Wilmer 2017).

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In the parallel feature search (used in our experiment) the participant searches for a target that stands out by its unique features, therefore, induces exogenous attention (Radvansky & Ashcraft, 2016). Portugal et al. (2020), have found that in the visual search task, high touch screen users (toddlers) were faster than low users in the feature search. This evidence suggests that exposing toddlers to touchscreens at early development could be beneficial to brain development in exogenous orienting (Portugal et Al. 2020). As people that use smartphones frequently are more alerted towards environmental interruptions we have predicted that their performance in parallel search will be better compared to the low-users. 

 

There were two specific areas of attention this study is focusing on – participants’ attention control and their ability to sustain attention over a period of time. To compare high users’ and low users’ ability to sustain attention, the present study has used the Sustained Attention to Response Task (Robertson, 1997). The background literature (Lee et al. 2015) are suggesting that high smartphone users may have greater difficulty sustaining attention. The long-term impact of smartphones could be also reflected in an individual’s ability to sustain attention using the Sustained Attention to Response Test (SART).

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The results of this study have not found a significant difference between the two groups in the Visual Search Task.

The significant finding of this study was, that participants using their smartphones more frequently performed better on the SART, than the low user group (not the high user group as predicted).

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A possible explanation for these findings is that the smartphone is a complex tool, every one of us is using it differently and we are impacted by it in different ways (positively or negatively). As suggested by Christakis (2009), watching TV is enhancing involuntary attention in children therefore it is associated with difficulty controlling attention. Perhaps the same impact could be observed on participants using smartphones only for watching videos online, however, finding such participants is impossible. On the other hand, participants who would only use smartphones to play games and other cognitive tasks, which require a scan of the visual environment as observed in the study by Green & Bavelier, (2003), could prove to have better endogenous attention. Again, finding such participants that are not biased by other apps and activities on their smartphones is rare. Smartphones have various types of use such as watching videos, scrolling on social media websites, playing different types of games etc. and separating these activities to be able to separately test their impact on attention hasn't been successful. 

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The inability to observe differences in exogenous and endogenous attention control may have been due to dividing participants into high and low groups, based on the average time spent on their device. These findings may suggest, that the impact of smartphone usage depends on what activities users engage in as well as the amount of time spent on the smartphone. Some activities could be beneficial to a certain extent   (a certain amount of time) as long as it does not prevent the individual from developing in other areas.

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An explanation, for no significant differences found between high and low user groups in parallel and serial search, as opposed to the findings of Portugal et al. (2020), was that in their study, researchers tested toddlers whose brains were at the peak of their development (Mundkur, 2005), therefore the differences in usage may have caused a rapid change in their attention abilities. However, participants recruited in the present study were adults who had only begun to use smartphones in 2007 and onwards and their brain was relatively fixed in this stage of development, compared to toddlers (Fuchs & Flugge, 2014). This suggests that the differences in attention control may not be as apparent in adults as they were in toddlers.

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The results of the second hypothesis demonstrated that the low user group were not significantly better at SART compared to the high user group. In fact, it was the high users who have shown to be significantly better at sustaining their attention in this task. This indicates that high users are better at sustaining their attention, however, there is no previous linkage to such a finding. Again, it may be the case, that participants’ average time spent on their smartphones is not a sufficient indicator of heavy smartphone users.

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To design a study with a smartphone naïve group of participants and match them with frequent smartphone users is almost impossible nowadays. However, these findings should encourage the users to be mindful of the time spent on their device, what benefit it brings them as well as maintaining a healthy balance, and more importantly, the designers should consider all the positive and negative impacts the product can bring to the user.

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